ABSTRACT
Various accounts have been offered for display errors, from the child’s confusion of related semantic fields, to the child’s semantic reorganization, to the child’s inability to retrieve the correct items in lexical memory during production. This chapter investigates the nature and origin of these errors as a function of the organization and reorganization of a developmental lexicon, using DevLex as the basis of modeling. The semantic map is a dynamically growing network that learns word representations derived from word cooccurrence matrices in child-directed speech. It organizes word representations incrementally, adding new units to areas with higher lexical density. DevLex is evaluated with respect to its accuracy in semantic representations and in productions. In particular, the onset of errors reflects a number of important factors that govern lexical development. In sum, DevLex provides a new connectionist model that can simulate a developmental lexicon and relate to realistic language learning with self-organizing principles.
